Worth the pain of two OS installs to use fastest SSD in my desktop?

roadie · 23 Nov 2011 at 10:39

Hey Guys,

The SSD in my laptop went kaput recently, and I've received the replacement in the form of a 60Gb Corsair Force 3 drive. Only my desktop can take advantage of the full speed (SATA 6Gbps) it would offer, but currently it has a first gen Crucial in it. It's used only as a boot and essential programmes drive, with games and media having their own drives.

What I'm wondering is whether I'll see any significant improvement in boot and loading programme by replacing the Crucial in my desktop with the Corsair?

I'm pretty happy with how my desktop performs at present, but am wondering whether it's worth the hassle of swapping the Crucial out and performing two OS installs instead of the one? Can anyone who has upgraded SSDs offer an opinion?

Cheers!

skyripper · 23 Nov 2011 at 12:59

I went from a Vertex 1 to a Vertex 2e - over twice the speed based on the specs. Benchmarks were nice n impressive.

In reality I didnt notice a whole lot of difference in boot time or in normal usage. The Vertex 1 however went into my media centre, and transformed that...

I wouldnt reinstall from one to another, I'd just use Acronis or Partion Wizard to clone it to the new drive. Power off, swap the drives, stick the old one wherever you want

roadie · 28 Nov 2011 at 11:23

Thanks for this. I tried using Partition Wizard to copy the disk, but it didn't align the drive properly. It works fine, but I will probably reformat for maximum performance.

skyripper · 28 Nov 2011 at 11:25

Acronis supposedly deals with Alignment on SSDs. I dont know what the % difference is between an aligned partition and an unaligned partition.

drunkenmaster · 28 Nov 2011 at 12:03

skyripper said:
Acronis supposedly deals with Alignment on SSDs. I dont know what the % difference is between an aligned partition and an unaligned partition.

A ridiculously large amount on certain drives, still a decent amount on others, Crucials in particular suffer from HUGE slow down, though that is the more recent Crucial's and not the Indilinx based ones.

As Skyripper said, benchmarks can go through the roof, but the general feel of a hugely "faster" SSD is almost non existant.

The biggest difference between SSD's/hdd's is random 4kb read/writes. You're talking 15-20mb's for each on a M225 drive, and you're looking at 0.5Mb's on a HDD. The difference is phenomenal, add that to next to no latency and almost all the instant opening of programs, and the less bogging down when multitasking(remember on hdd's when you unrar some big file and try to load a game or do something, and everything goes to hell for a while, ssd's, barely notice it).

While sequential has gone up on newer drives, the random read/write hasn't, not at low queue depth anyway and MOST home usage is queue depth 5 and under, so while the 4kb randoms at queue depth 32 look awesome, you'll never see them, you're talking about a server with 20 people asking for different files to see that kind of usage really.

So, it will be faster, but not much, the sata6 part if it doesn't make a difference, and the async nature of the cheaper Sandforce drives, even more so on the 60gb ones, means they are WAY below the specs you see listed for the 240/120gb versions. There is already likely a LOT less difference in speed than you think as the smaller drives are significantly slower than their bigger brothers.

roadie · 28 Nov 2011 at 12:40

Fantastic post! Thanks.

I benchmarked the copied Corsair against the Crucial last night using the AS SSD benchmark, and the Corsair came out slower. The Crucial is one of the original Indilinx drives, so there's no way that this should be happening. I'm going to upgrade the firmware on the Corsair before wiping and reinstalling Windows tonight. I don't expect to see a massive improvement in use, but it will offer some peace of mind and will be relatively quick and painless. Whacked the Crucial in my laptop last night.

roadie · 28 Nov 2011 at 22:06

OK install done. Here is the Crucial as of yesterday:

Here is the Corsair as of today:

I'd expected better! Any ideas?

roadie · 29 Nov 2011 at 08:37

One more benchmark comparing the two drives against each other

Crucial:

Corsair:

I had expected for the Corsair to be faster in everything. Any idea why this is not the case?